War Down Under

By
Pete Brady
on February 10, 2003

Nimbin cops: harrassing the Hemp Embassy aggressively.There’s a green ganjafied place in the Southern Hemisphere that Cannabis Culture has traveled to year after year, a place called Nimbin, where Aussies are smoking locally-grown Sativa instead of drinking beer.
The little village has hosted ten years of May harvest parties called Mardi Grass, and its courageous residents, such as Oasis Cafe Owner Andy Kavasilas and Nimbin Hemp Embassy honcho Michael Balderstone, have made cannabis a cause and a business, legally of course, but always right at the edge of the cliff where the government would like to push them off.

Nimbin is located in New South Wales (NSW), and all the Australia government should be worried about right now is global warming, which has slapped Australia with a drought that is not temporary, a drought that is killing Australia.

But instead of fighting global warming, bad agricultural practices, and population growth which are exacerbating the drought’s effects, the NSW government is fighting Nimbin.

They’ve been plaguing the rural community with drug dogs, raids, narks, heroin addicts, and lack of public services funding for several years.

Oh, and they’ve also come back this year, as in years past, with helicopters buzzing around the pastoral countryside, with dogs and illegal search teams terrorizing residents as the land down under comes into late summer and Sativa harvest season approaches.

“Police consistently ignore search warrant requirements is all I’m saying,” complained Balderstone. “This drug war is almost forgotten in the Middle East build up [the Aussie government is an enthusiastic partner and cheerleader in the impending American-led Iraq war crime], but the war on drugs has a lot in common with what’s happening now in Iraq. It’s another American war with big business interests involved. Oil may be the prize in Iraq but fortunes are being made off of prohibition, by all sorts of companies. From pharmaceutical giants to the jail guards’ union, who are the biggest political donors to make sure prohibition is maintained, it’s big business.”

Balderstone, a staunchly independent man who saved the Hemp Embassy from many a raid and persecution, and who once blockaded Nimbin’s police force inside its own police station, says NSW’s political boss, Bob Carr, is a making big mistakes when it comes to drug issues and social policy.

“Bob Carr’s trying hard to catch up building new jails, but worse than that, he’s breeding a huge new culture of Al Capone wannabes in the younger generation who have lost a lot of respect for laws in general these days, as the crime figures show. How can Bob Carr tell us he’s an expert on American history, did he miss the chapter on prohibition?”

Balderstone says the Nimbin HEMP Embassy received many complaints last year regarding low flying police helicopters and aggressive police behaviour.

KoalaMan, a backwoods pot grower who lives like a marsupial amongst the eucalyptus and leech-infested glades an hour from Nimbin, says the copter jockeys are war criminals who deserve to be treated like “invading Huns.”

“I have a warning for them,” he said via cell phone from his remote bunker somewhere in the vast down under. “They should watch Mad Max, and they should watch Terminator, and they should remember what happened to the German Nazis in World War Two. Then, they should remember Vietnam, and Bali. And then, they should remember that if marijuana did not cause men to be unusually peaceful, that when they came in here with their noisy, polluting death machines, their goddam dogs, and their ‘sporting’ attitudes, that they would become examples of why it’s bad to poke your nose into some other fella’s back yard. If they succeed in getting rid of all of our mull [cannabis], then we won’t have our peace drug, and god knows what might happen to them then.”Nimbin cops: harrassing the Hemp Embassy aggressively.